Competitive Analysis Techniques

5 Minute Wins: Analyze Competitor Ads Using Ad Library Setting Up Ad Library  First things first, you need to set up the Ad Library. If you're using Facebook, simply go to the Facebook Ad Library page. For Google, you can use the Google Ads Transparency Report. Both platforms require you to enter some basic details and create an account if you don’t have one already. Searching for Competitors Once you’re set up, enter the names of your main competitors into the search bar. You’ll see a list of their active ads. It’s like peeking into their playbook. Pay attention to the brands that consistently appear – they are likely your biggest competitors. Analyzing Ad Copy and Messaging Key Points to Consider: Tone and Style: Is the messaging formal or casual? Key Phrases: What phrases are repeated? Value Proposition: What main benefits are highlighted? Evaluating Visual Elements Key Points to Consider: Imagery: Are they using product images, lifestyle shots, or graphics? Colors: What color schemes are prevalent? Format: Are the ads static images, videos, or carousels? Decoding Offers and CTAs Key Points to Consider: Offers: Are there discounts, free trials, or exclusive deals? Calls to Action: Are the CTAs direct (e.g., “Buy Now”) or subtle (e.g., “Learn More”)? Tracking Ad Frequency and Variations Key Points to Consider: Frequency: How often do they update their ads? Variations: Are they testing different versions of the same ad? Inferring Target Audience Key Points to Consider: Demographics: Who is the ad speaking to? Interests: What interests or pain points are being addressed? Monitoring Engagement Metrics Key Points to Consider: Likes and Reactions: Are the ads receiving positive reactions? Comments: What are people saying in the comments? Shares: How often are the ads being shared?   Applying Insights to Your Strategy Key Points to Consider: Strengths: What are your competitors doing well? Weaknesses: Where do they fall short? Opportunities: How can you leverage their weaknesses? By analyzing their ad copy, visuals, offers, and engagement metrics, you can uncover effective tactics and refine your own ad campaigns for better performance. This quick check can provide you with actionable data to stay ahead in the competitive landscape. #AdLibrary #CompetitorAnalysis #AdStrategy #DigitalMarketing #PPC #MarketingTips #AdInsights #BusinessGrowth #AdvertisingTrends #MarketingStrategy

Hate doing Competitor Analysis? Here is how to do it, without overwhelming yourself 👇🏽 While competitor analysis is a super critical part of any market research and differentiation strategy, most folks don't know how to do it rightly. I have seen people filling up a gazillion of slides and pages with every detail of the competitors, this leads to a popular PM disease called: "Analysis Paralysis" This also demotivates a lot of professionals from pursuing market research, because it gets overwhelming quickly. Here are the 4 questions (+ tools) I would suggest you start with in your next competitive research: 1. What problems do they solve, are they relevant for our users? 2. What are their strengths? (Check their website lingo, check their ads from Facebook/Google/Linkedin Ads Library, use the product by yourself, and observe customers to find this). 3. What are their weaknesses? (Check their social media, and customer conversations, use the product by yourself, and make a quick need-gap analysis). 4. How do they acquire and retain users? (This will help you identify channels, communication, and product strategy). Start with these basics, and then build upon this foundation. The best resources for competitor analysis: 1. Google keyword tool: Find your keywords, and Discover who else ranks on your keywords. 2. Google/Facebook/Linkedin ads library: To understand their communication strategy and maybe star features. 3. Quora, Reddit, and Google reviews: For understanding customer voice and experiences. 4. Website: Probably the best resource. Will help you understand How they position themselves, who are top customers, and benefits. Always remember: Customer Obsession >> Competitor Obsession. Work backward from customer needs. Which is your favorite tool for competitive analysis? P.S. This is a slide from our detailed module on GTM strategy at HelloPM. Check out https://hellopm.co to find what we have in store to supercharge your Product Career ⚡️ #productmanagement #competitor

I ran a 14-day test to "audit" a competitor's marketing strategy: What I did over the 14 days: Day 1 of competitor analysis: - I visited their website on day 1 - I audited PDPs - I mapped their hierarchy of intent Day 2-5 of competitor analysis: (Now it gets interesting) - I logged the times of their remarketing ads - Screenshot every variation + timestamp them - Note any sequencing (are they rotating creatives or hammering one offer?) Days 6-8 on their email funnel: - I sign up for their list - I trigger an abandoned cart - I track subject lines, timings, and offers in their flow Day 9 is purchase day: - I fired up their store - I recorded the buying journey - I made the purchase - I took screenshots of up/cross-sells - I checked their thank-you email Day 11 the product arrived: - I audited how happy the delivery driver is (Joking) - I looked at the quality of the packaging - Of course I tested the product Days 12-14 the post-purchase follow-up: - I watched follow-up emails and retention tactics - I checked if/how they requested reviews - I noted any loyalty, referral, or subscription pushes This might seem a bit much lol. But after 14 days, I’d mapped their acquisition & retention journey. The best part? You can stack this against your brand and instantly see the gaps. Would you run this 14-day test on your top competitor? P.S the screenshot is just part of the buying journey you can look at. #Shopify | #Ecommerce

If your competitors keep showing up in ChatGPT answers and you don’t, there’s a reason. And it’s fixable. Here’s the full 8 step process to figure out why and close the gap fast. Step 1: Identify your real AI competitors There are three groups to watch for. - The brands AI mentions next to you - The brands AI prefers instead of you - The brands your audience compares you to inside AI search Ahrefs Brand Radar gives you all three. Step 2: Define the entities that matter Add brand variations and domains for every competitor. Simple version: main brand and main domain. Full version: products, sub brands, alternate sites. Save this setup as a preset so you can refresh it quarterly. Step 3: Benchmark your AI visibility Track four numbers. - Mentions - Citations - Impressions - AI Share of Voice Then compare yourself against competitors across AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity and others. Document the numbers so you can measure progress over time. Step 4: Study how AI talks about you It is not enough to show up. How you appear matters. Check: - Volume of mentions - Placement inside responses - Depth of coverage - Positioning and framing - Sentiment - Credibility language Ahrefs research shows branded web mentions correlate most with showing up in AI Overviews. So this analysis tells you exactly what to reinforce. Step 5: Compare Share of Voice for your core topics List the topics where you want leadership status. Search each one in Brand Radar. Check your Share of Voice against competitors. - Note irrelevant topics to drop - Note extra competitors tied to the topic - Note unbranded opportunities you can win - Note attributes AI associates with the topic Step 6: Find top cited pages and patch content gaps Open the cited pages report for each competitor. Look for gaps in visibility, topics, formats and freshness. Are they writing about topics you ignore? Are they publishing formats you lack? Are they updating content more often? Create or refresh pages to close those gaps. Step 7: Compare brand mentions across the web AI often relies on third party content to talk about brands. Not your own site. Use the web pages report to collect competitor mentions. Export them, delete anything coming from their own websites, and line everything up in a spreadsheet. Where you see empty cells, those are missed opportunities. Then study how they earned those mentions. Look at content types, publishers, triggers, and distribution habits. Step 8: Turn everything into clear priorities Summarize the whole analysis into three buckets. Fix: visibility gaps. Build: content areas where competitors lead. Influence: publications and sites that shape AI answers in your niche. Run this monthly or quarterly. You will see exactly why competitors appear ahead of you, and you will know what to do next.

Outsmarting Competitors Starts With Understanding Them Knowing what your rivals are doing isn’t enough. To stay ahead, you need to understand why they act, how they think, and what they’ll do next Enter Porter’s Four Corners Analysis—a strategic tool that goes deeper than surface-level competitor tracking. ☑ The Four Corners of Competitive Insight: 1️⃣ Drivers (Motivation) ↳ What are their long-term goals? ↳ What internal or external forces are pushing their strategy? 2️⃣ Current Strategy ↳ How are they competing today? ↳ What’s their positioning, focus, and resource allocation? 3️⃣ Capabilities ↳ What resources, skills, and strengths do they have? ↳ Can they realistically achieve their ambitions—or are there gaps to exploit? 4️⃣ Management Assumptions ↳ What beliefs guide their decisions? ↳ Are they making flawed assumptions about the market or competitors? ☑ Why This Matters: ↳ Predict moves before they happen—and respond proactively. ↳ Spot weaknesses between ambition and ability. ↳ Make smarter strategic bets on pricing, products, and market entry. The real advantage isn’t just tracking competitors—it’s understanding their logic so you can outthink them. P.S. If strategy and competitive intelligence interest you, follow me for more insights.

LinkedIn is a goldmine for competitor research, especially for B2B companies. The key to success on LinkedIn is to learn from people & brands who are doing good on the platform. Here's how to analyze your competitors and glean valuable insights: 1. Company page critique: → See how they present themselves visually and verbally. → What image are they trying to project? → What are their key differentiators? 2. Founder's Page: → See what kind of content seems to resonate most with their audience. → Which kind of posts are getting the most engagement on their profile? → Are they using a mix of text, images, and videos? 3. Engagement strategies: → How do they respond to comments and messages? → Observe how they interact with their followers. → Do they actively participate in discussions? 4. Who are their followers? → Understand the age, location, job titles, etc. of their followers. → It can help you refine your target audience. 5. Job postings as insights: → Observe what kind of talent are they looking for? → What skills and experience do they value? → This can reveal their growth plans and company culture. PS: Learning from the best = learning from your top competitors. Are you following these rules for competitor analysis? #linkedingrowth

Technical SEO Tip: You can use Screaming Frog + the PageSpeed Insights API to audit your site's performance data at scale. Here's the process: One of the features that I feel isn't talked about enough in Screaming Frog is their "API" integration functionality. With API integrations, you can connect Screaming Frog to a lot of external tools. This includes GA4, Search Console, PageSpeed Insights and even LLMs like OpenAI and Gemini. This gives you incredible powerful to use Screaming Frog to blend your crawl data with third party sources. One super useful review I've found myself doing over the years is using the PageSpeed Insights API to quickly review a site's performance data: 1. Open up Screaming Frog 2. Navigate to Configuration > API Access > PageSpeed Insights 3. In the "Account Information" tab - connect your PageSpeed Insights API key. Click the link in Screaming Frog and click "Get A Key" to create a new project. You'll get the API key here. 4. Copy/paste the API key in the "Secret Key" field 5. In the "Metrics" tab, configure the metrics you want to scrape into Screaming Frog. You can scrape in a TON of data such as Core Web Vitals, PSI recommendations, page elements breakdowns and more. 6. Click "OK" and start your crawl on Spider mode 7. In the "PageSpeed tab", you'll be able to see your performance data. This is super useful when you want to analyze your performance data across the entire site quickly. You won't need to manually plug URLs into PageSpeed Insights. Instead, you'll have Screaming Frog do the work for you. Also super useful for analyzing and comparing competitor performance data.

SEO Tip: Here is how to measure your sites topical authority. A page can be a perfect fit for a query and still lose to a competitor with a weaker page because Google is evaluating the entire site's topical signature. The screenshot below shows a Site Topical Health chart that maps a client's site against a competitor in the same niche. Each dot represents an entire site, positioned on two axes: Focus and Drift. These two metrics are not theoretical. According to the Google Content Warehouse API leak, Google stores siteFocusScore and siteRadius as part of QualityAuthorityTopicEmbeddings — the system that helps determine which sites are trusted authorities for a topic during retrieval and ranking. It makes sense. If you wanted to measure topical authority at scale across the web, you would not just rate individual pages. You would compute a site-level embedding from every page on the site, then measure how tightly the pages cluster around that center. This reveals that Topical Authority is a measurable signature, not just a reputation concept. The chart breaks sites into four quadrants based on how tight the content is and how much it drifts off-theme. - Topical Authority (top-left): every page on-topic, few if any outlier pages. The trust position. - Focused with Drift (top-right): strong core theme, but too many outlier pages dragging the site topical authority. - Bounded Mediocrity (bottom-left): many shallow pages, no real depth or central theme. Think too many doorway pages. - Unfocused Generalist (bottom-right): content sprayed across unrelated topics. In this example, the client's site sits in Focused with Drift. The competitor sits in Topical Authority. Both have strong cores, but the competitor is not carrying the dead weight of off-topic pages dragging their site embedding away from the main theme. Search engines do not evaluate your page in isolation. They evaluate whether the site behind it is a credible source for the topic. This is also why pruning, redirecting, and relocating low-relevance content matters more than people realize. Managing and restoring the topical signature your site sends to retrieval algorithms can make all the difference. How to do this: 1 - Crawl every page on your site and your top 1-3 competitors. 2 - Generate vector embeddings for each page. 3 - Compute each site's centroid by averaging the page embeddings. 4 - Calculate Focus and Radius Scores 6 - Calculate Drift = Focus - Radius. 7 - Plot your site and your competitors on the Focus × Drift chart. 8 - For sites in Focused with Drift, identify the outlier pages dragging the centroid down and prune, relocate, or redirect them. Creating more pages just for more content can negatively impact your site. A strategic content plan and roadmap will make all the difference over time in both search engines and answer engines.

Most people treat SEO like guesswork. They write content, sprinkle in keywords, and pray for rankings. But without competitor analysis? You’re flying blind. I learned this the hard way in my early SEO days. I spent months optimizing content, only to realize I had no idea who I was competing with or how they were winning. Once I shifted my focus to strategic competitor analysis, everything changed. Here’s what that process looks like now for every client I work with: Audit the top 3-5 ranking competitors → What keywords are they targeting? → How are they structuring content? → What’s their backlink profile like? Find the content gaps → What questions are they ignoring? → Where can we offer deeper value or updated data? Study their backlinks → Which sources are driving authority? → Can we earn similar or better-quality links? Track ranking patterns over time → What’s rising or falling in SERPs? → Which changes triggered those shifts? Competitor analysis doesn’t mean copying. It means learning. It gives you the map, so your SEO strategy isn’t just reactive, it’s intentional. So if you’re investing time and money into SEO but skipping this step… You're not just falling behind, you’re missing your biggest opportunity to grow smarter, faster, and more efficiently. SEO without competitor analysis isn’t enough. It’s like showing up to a race without knowing the course. ♻️ Repost if you know someone who’s stuck in the SEO guessing game.

I reverse-engineered 100+ local competitors. Found the exact tactics they use to dominate. Here's the complete local competitor analysis framework: Step 1: Identify Your Real Competitors Not all competitors matter equally. Who ranks top 3 for your main keywords? Who appears in local pack? Who has similar service offerings? Who serves same geographic area? Pick top 3-5 to analyze deeply. Step 2: GMB Deep Dive For each competitor, document primary category, secondary categories, review count, average rating, review velocity, response rate, post frequency, photo count, and Q&A activity. Use Local Falcon to track their rankings. Step 3: Citation Analysis Check where they're listed: industry directories, local chambers, BBB, Yelp, Facebook, niche directories. If they're there, you should be too. Step 4: Website Analysis Audit their site structure (architecture, pages, service pages, location pages), content (blog frequency, depth, keyword targeting), and technical elements (site speed, mobile optimization, schema markup). Step 5: Content Gap Analysis Find what they rank for that you don't. Use Ahrefs or SEMrush: Enter competitor domain, go to "Organic Keywords," filter by local keywords, identify gaps. These are your opportunities. Step 6: Backlink Analysis Check their link profile. Note domain authority, total backlinks, referring domains, local links, and link types. Replicate their best local links. Step 7: Review Strategy Analysis Study their review approach: frequency, quality, keywords in reviews, review sources, response strategy, negative review handling. Learn from their wins and mistakes. Step 8: Content Analysis Analyze their best content: What topics get engagement? What format? How often do they publish? What's their content depth? Create better versions of what works. Step 9: Local Engagement Check their community involvement: sponsorships, local partnerships, community events, charity work, local press mentions, chamber membership. These create local authority signals. Step 10: Competitive Advantage Matrix Create a spreadsheet: You versus competitors 1-5. Rows: GMB optimization, review count, citation count, content depth, backlinks, social presence. Score each 1-10. Identify where you're behind. Step 11: Gap Prioritization High impact plus easy equals do first (citations, GMB optimization). High impact plus hard equals do second (content creation, link building). Low impact equals ignore. Step 12: The Action Plan Quarterly goals: Q1 Foundation (match competitor citations, optimize GMB), Q2 Content (create service and location pages), Q3 Authority (build local links), Q4 Scale (expand content, advanced tactics). Tools for Analysis Free: Google My Business search, manual audits, Google Search Console. Paid: Local Falcon ($35/month), BrightLocal ($50/month), Ahrefs ($99/month), SEMrush ($120/month). Competitive analysis is ongoing. Audit quarterly. Adapt strategy. Stay ahead.